Essential SEO Tips That Will Boost Your Search Engine Ranking
SEO is the most frightening and misunderstood word in the vocabulary of the average online marketer because it goes hand in hand with the promises of high rankings, tons of free traffic and countless sales from one side and the fears of being banned on the other. Master SEO and you've mastered it all, some might say!
OF course I am deriding with this kind of thinking, but many people adore SEO and SEOers no matter if they admit it or not.
Otherwise how do you explain the fact that so many people are paying thousands of dollars for SEO services when Google says it as clear as this: no one can guarantee top rankings in google results?
After reading this article you will know some very basic SEO rules, you will see there is a lot of work to be done yourself before even think about additional help only in the form of a concrete consultation when the price difference is substantial.
Remember: search engines are indexing web pages and NOT web sites. So, from now on we are talking about web pages.
Let start with the very basic terms and building stones of effective search engine optimization campaign:
On page optimization:
- Keyword brainstorming - decide on the topic of your page, of course it must be connected with the site's overall theme.
- Choosing keyword phrase - use keyword suggestion tool and look for three or four words phrase because you don't want to compete with PR5+ pages with thousands of backllinks.
- Web site structure - choose between two or three column layout. I think it's not bad the first tag in your body tag to be H1 with the key phrase and 100% keyword prominence, don't you? I mean two column layout with right side menu bar.
Don't go over three levels deep - homepage, category page and article page. Make sure all links in the first and second level are inbound links leading to your article/product page through relevant key phrase link text, where you want your targeted visitors to click on your affiliate or adsense links. - Webpage design and layout - find the best place and style for your heading, adsense, images, lists, white space, color scheme, borders...
- Title tag - learn what keyword prominence means - try to place your key phrase in the begging of the title
- META description and keyword tags - Google uses the information from the meta description tag - describe the core content of the page and don't forget to include your key phrase as closer as possible to the beginning. Don't go over 150 characters or 20-25 words, try to use less stop words: and, at, that, or, be, by, who, what...
- Key phrase in the URL - your key phrase must be your file name, dash separated, without stop words, of course. (For urls in Google, I would recommend using dashes. Matt Cutts) - http://www.yoursite.com/category-page/key-phrase.html
- Heading tags - H1 to H6 - use them also to divide the blocks of text for easy reading. Don't stick to the exact key phrase only, use related close words (Google calls it stemming - building additional words by adding a prefix or suffix and using plural)
- IMG ALT tag - use the key phrase in the alt tag
- Key phrase distribution - don't over do it, write for your visitors, not for spiders
- Styled key phrase in the body - once bolded in the first paragraph and once italicized in another one is enough.
- Linking text to the page - forget about 'click here' and 'read more', use your key phrase as a link text.
- Web page code validation - years ago I made this mistake and for three months my site was not indexed. After researching for possible reasons, I validated my code and with the next googlebot visit, most of my pages were indexed.
- Bad keyword practices - hidden (the same color for multiple keywords and the background) text, keyword stuffing, duplicate content, sneaky java redirects, page cloaking, doorway pages - don't play with the fire.
Off page optimization:
- Back links from directories - don't pay for page rank lower than PR5
- Back links from search engines - don't bother to submit to thousands engines while the important ones are fewer than twenty.
- Back links from high Page Rank sites and blogs - THE NAME OF THE GAME - one way organic links. Hint: every marketer loves quality professional content and many webmasters would gladly publish your articles on their sites with the precious one way links back to your site.
- Bad link practices - link selling, automatic link exchange, FFA links, link farms...
A gentle warning - if you don't understand what I am talking about, if you don't know what are these tags, what is domain name, hosting account, FTP file transfer, maybe it's not the right time to build your own site, it's time to start learning some basic HTML, CSS, web design, copywriting...
Or you can use some free blogging platform like Blogger or Wordpress to post your articles without any additional SEO and what ever other troubles. But chances to make it online blogging (I mean making some good money out of it) are quite small.
There is NO way to make the whole web business process work without understanding of keywords, linking, niches, web copywriting, traffic sources, rss, autoresponders, affiilaite programs, too many to count...
You see, a lot of work is required to build even five page website properly structured and organized, but this is all doable process.
The ones that get it finished are who will get the checks later and we belong to that group of winners by our choice and persistence.
Free mp3 audio course 'Do it yourself SEO' will help you implement all above mentioned tips and even more - you will learn about the super successful PAD linking technique.
Click here and learn why search engine backlinks are the key to top rankings.
2007 © Ivan Piskov & Smart Web Marketing
